Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Rhode Island Current Conditions Index -- September 2019, Leonard Lardaro

The Rhode Island Current Conditions Index

No abstract provided.

Essays In Empirical Economics, Agustin Indaco

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation consists of two chapters that utilize distinct econometric methods and novel datasets.

In the first chapter, “From Twitter to GDP: Estimating Economic Activity From Social Media”, I collect all geo-located image tweets shared on Twitter in 2012-2013 to study whether the volume of tweets is a valid proxy for estimating current GDP in USD at the country level. My preferred model explains 94 percent of the cross-country variation and the residuals from the model are negatively correlated to a data quality index, indicating that my estimates of GDP are more accurate for countries with more reliable GDP data. …

Essays On Applied Machine Learning For Implied Volatility Interpolation And Artificial Counterfactuals, Pablo A. Crespo

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation consists of two chapters.

Chapter 1: Volatility estimates under the risk neutral density have become a much revisited topic of interest in recent years. The density proves itself a powerful tool for sentiment analysis, since its moments provide insights about expectations in price trends. A standard procedure for its extraction utilizes artificial volatility predictions to form a dense enough grid for approximating a complete probability distribution. This paper proposes two common machine learning technique variations to produce implied volatility predictions when data is very scarce. First, a model using regularization through a variation of a generalized LASSO path …

Singapore As A Sustainable City: Past, Present And The Future, Tomoki Fujii, Rohan Ray

Research Collection School Of Economics

This paper outlines Singapore’s major sustainability challenges and its policy response in the areas of land use, transportation, waste management, water, and energy. We review the current and past Concept Plans from the perspective of sustainable land use and provide an overview of transportation policy in Singapore. We also examine Singapore’s policies to manage increasing wastes and review the four tap water management plan. Finally, we look at various initiatives by the government for sustainable use of energy. While Singapore has been successful in many ways in transforming itself into one of the most prosperous and sustainable cities in the …

An Interview Question That Brought About Some Thoughts, Zhengxiao Wu

Research Collection School Of Economics

We tackle the question posed by journalist Mehdi Hassan – on how many Chinese lives could be lost or would have to be lost to justify a single percentage of economic growth. We considered a utility maximization problem where the utility function is defined to be the sum of the life expectancy at birth for all Chinese nationals.

Self-Selecting Into Being A Dictator: Distributional Consequences, Lara Ezquerra, Praveen Kujal

ESI Working Papers

We allow for principals to self-select into delegating, or not, the allocation decision to an agent in a modified dictator game. The standard dictator game arises when principal´s choose to make the allocation decision themselves. Dictators thus obtained transfer lower amounts to receivers, relative to when the decision making is passed to an agent under delegation (or in the standard dictator game). Principals choose to be a dictator nearly half of the time. The average amount transferred by individuals who delegate in more than half of the rounds is significantly higher than the quantity transferred by those who choose to …

Estimation And Inference Of Fractional Continuous-Time Model With Discrete-Sampled Data, Xiaohu Wang, Weilin Xiao, Jun Yu

Research Collection School Of Economics

This paper proposes a two-stage method for estimating parameters in a para-metric fractional continuous-time model based on discrete-sampled observations. In the first stage, the Hurst parameter is estimated based on the ratio of two second-order differences of observations from different time scales. In the second stage, the other parameters are estimated by the method of moments. All estimators have closed-form expressions and are easy to obtain. A large sample theory of the pro-posed estimators is derived under either the in-fill asymptotic scheme or the double asymptotic scheme. Extensive simulations show that the proposed theory performs well in finite samples. Two …

Forecasting Realized Volatility Using A Nonnegative Semiparametric Model, Anders Eriksson, Daniel P. A. Preve, Jun Yu

Research Collection School Of Economics

This paper introduces a parsimonious and yet flexible semiparametric model to forecastfinancial volatility. The new model extends a related linear nonnegative autoregressive modelpreviously used in the volatility literature by way of a power transformation. It is semiparametric inthe sense that the distributional and functional form of its error component is partially unspecified.The statistical properties of the model are discussed and a novel estimation method is proposed.Simulation studies validate the new method and suggest that it works reasonably well in finitesamples. The out-of-sample forecasting performance of the proposed model is evaluated against anumber of standard models, using data on S&P 500 …

Effects Of Innovations In Health Care Provision And Financing, Hoda Nouri Khajavi

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation consists of four chapters that study the impacts of innovations in health care provision and financing. The relentless rise in US health care costs has led the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to launch various pilot programs to create financial incentives for health care providers, suppliers, and local communities to improve the efficiency of the health care system. The fist chapter of this manuscript reviews the main pilot programs implemented and/or funded by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services since the 111th United States Congress passed the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, also known as …

Lying And Shirking Under Oath, Nicolas Jacquemet, Alexander James, Stéphane Luchini, James J. Murphy, Jason F. Shogren

ESI Working Papers

This study explores whether an oath to honesty can reduce both shirking and lying among crowd-sourced internet workers. Using a classic coin-flip experiment, we first show that a substantial majority of Mechanical Turk workers both shirk and lie when reporting the number of heads flipped. We then demonstrate lying can be reduced by first asking each worker to swear voluntarily on his or her honor to tell the truth in subsequent economic decisions. The oath, however, did not reduce shirking as measured by time- at-coin-flip-task, although it did increase the time they spent answering a demographic survey. Conditional on response, …

The Effect Of Public-Place Smoking Bans On Risky Health Behavior Among Different Races And Ethnicities In The United States, Muntasir Rahman

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

There is an established body of literature on the effect of public-place smoking bans on smoking behavior. However, these studies focus on the effect of the public-place bans on the overall population and ignore racial/ethnic heterogeneity, therein. Given that there is ample evidence of racial/ethnic differences in risky health behaviors (such as smoking and drinking) in the United States, research that sheds light on this differential impact is necessary. Thus, the two studies presented in this thesis work estimates the heterogeneous racial/ethnic effects of public-place smoking bans on smoking and drinking-related behavior of U.S. adults.

In the first chapter we …

Grower Risk And Community Perception: Impediments To Growing Maine's Aquaculture Industry, Avery W. Cole

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Maine has a long and proud history of working waterfronts and commercial fishing. However, in recent decades, aquaculture, or the harvesting or growing of aquatic life, has emerged as another player in the coastal economy. Globally, aquaculture is experiencing the fastest growth of any food sector in the world as it subsidizes floundering wild-capture fisheries (FAO, 2014). Maine and the rest of the United States have not yet participated in this growth, which has led stakeholders and policymakers like the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to advocate for massive improvements to the sector by 2020 (NOAA, 2016). To ensure …

Adding Tournament To Tournament: Combining Between-Team And Within-Team Incentives, Michael Majerczyk, Roman Sheremeta, Yu Tian

ESI Working Papers

We examine theoretically and experimentally how combining between-team and within-team incentives affects behavior in team tournaments. Theory predicts that free-riding will occur when there are only between-team incentives, and offering within-team incentives may solve this problem. However, if individuals collude, then within-team incentives may not be as effective at reducing free-riding. Consistent with the theoretical predictions, the results of our experiment indicate that although between-team incentives are effective at increasing individual effort, there is substantial free-riding and declining effort over time. Importantly, a combination of between-team and within-team incentives is effective not only at generating effort but also at sustaining …

The Effect Of Citi Bike Introduction On Injury Rates In New York City, Masakazu Hiruma

Theses and Dissertations

This paper tests the hypothesis that the introduction of Citi Bike influences bicycle injuries by observing the gradual expansion of the bike share system in NYC. Data is analyzed from 2012-2018 New York Police Department (NYPD) Motor Vehicle Collisions and Citi Bike Station Feeds (NYC Open Data).

Strong Consistency Of Spectral Clustering For Stochastic Block Models, Liangjun Su, Wuyi Wang, Yichong Zhang

Research Collection School Of Economics

In this paper we prove the strong consistency of several methods based on the spectral clustering techniques that are widely used to study the community detection problem in stochastic block models (SBMs). We show that under some weak conditions on the minimal degree, the number of communities, and the eigenvalues of the probability block matrix, the K-means algorithm applied to the eigenvectors of the graph Laplacian associated with its first few largest eigenvalues can classify all individuals into the true community uniformly correctly almost surely. Extensions to both regularized spectral clustering and degree-corrected SBMs are also considered. We illustrate the …

Hypothesis Testing, Specification Testing And Model Selection Based On The Mcmc Output Using R, Yong Li, Jun Yu, Tao Zeng

Research Collection School Of Economics

This chapter overviews several MCMC-based test statistics for hypothesis testing andspecification testing and MCMC-based model selection criteria developed in recentyears. The statistics for hypothesis testing can be viewed as the MCMC version ofthe “trinity” of test statistics based in maximum likelihood (ML), namely, the likelihoodratio (LR) test, the Lagrange multiplier (LM) test, and the Wald test. The model selection criteria correspond to two predictive distributions. One of them can be viewed asthe MCMC version of widely used information criterion, AIC. The asymptotic distributions of the test statistics and model selection criteria are discussed. The test statisticsand model selection criteria are …

Rhode Island Current Conditions Index -- August 2019, Leonard Lardaro

The Rhode Island Current Conditions Index

No abstract provided.

Co-Enforcement Of Common Pool Resources: Experimental Evidence From Turfs In Chile, Carlos A. Chávez, James J. Murphy, John K. Stranlund

ESI Working Papers

This work presents the results of framed field experiments designed to study the co-enforcement of access to common pool resources. The experiments were conducted in the field with participants in the territorial use rights in fisheries (TURFs) management scheme that regulates access to nearshore fisheries along the coast of Chile. In the experiments, TURF members not only decided on harvest but also invested in monitoring to deter poaching by outsiders. Treatments varied whether the monitoring investment was an individual decision or determined by a group vote. Per-unit sanctions for poaching were exogenous as if provided by a government authority, and …

Dynamic And Integrated Models Of The Energy-Water-Land Nexus: Economic And Environmental Evaluation Of Policy Decisions, Elmira Kalhor

Economics ETDs

This dissertation contributes to the field of environmental and natural resource economics by employing data and hybrid simulation models to assess the economic and environmental outcomes of policy instruments applied to the complex systems of humans and the physical environment. Three integrated and dynamic models are developed to measure short- and long-term outcomes of price scenarios and resource capacity constraints.

The first chapter examines the balancing problem faced by a state-level policymaker. The Permian Basin is a source of significant revenue to the state of New Mexico; however, unconventional oil and gas production in this highly productive field requires large …

Classical Economics: Lost And Found, Sabiou M. Inoua, Vernon Smith

ESI Working Papers

"We argue that neoclassical value theory suffers from a more basic and serious logical indeterminacy, which is inherent in the axiom of price-taking behavior, and which renders price dynamics indeterminate before inquiring as to its stability. If everyone in the economy takes price as given, whence come these prices? Who is giving these prices? Jevons avoided the indeterminacy by assuming that people must have complete information on supply and demand, and the consequent equilibrium prices—‘perfect competition.’ Walras in effect imported an external agent who found the prices by trial-and-error-correction (the Walrasian Auctioneer). Paradoxically, both approaches had the potential better to …

A Quantile-Based Asset Pricing Model, Tomohiro Ando, Jushan Bai, Mitohide Nishimura, Jun Yu

Research Collection School Of Economics

It is well-known that the standard estimators of the risk premium in asset pricing models are biased when some price factors are omitted. To address this problem, we propose a novel quantile-based asset pricing model and a new estimation method. Our new asset pricing model allows for the risk premium to be quantile-dependent and our estimation method is applicable to models with unobserved factors. It avoids biased estimation results and always ensures a positive risk premium. The method is applied to the U.S., Japan, and U.K. stock markets. The empirical analysis demonstrates the clear benefits of our approach.

Limit Theory For Moderate Deviation From Integrated Garch Processes, Yubo Tao

Research Collection School Of Economics

This paper develops the limit theory of the GARCH(1,1) process that moderately deviates from IGARCH process towards both stationary and explosive regimes. The asymptotic theory extends Berkes et al. (2005) by allowing the parameters to have a slower rate of convergence. The results can be applied to unit root test for processes with mildly-integrated GARCH innovations (e.g. Boswijk (2001), Cavaliere and Taylor (2007, 2009)) and deriving limit theory of estimators for models involving mildly-integrated GARCH processes (e.g. Jensen and Rahbek (2004), Francq and Zakoïan (2012, 2013).

Rhode Island Current Conditions Index -- July 2019, Leonard Lardaro

The Rhode Island Current Conditions Index

No abstract provided.

Improved Marginal Likelihood Estimation Via Power Posteriors And Importance Sampling, Yong Li, Nianling Wang, Jun Yu

Research Collection School Of Economics

The power-posterior method of Friel and Pettitt (2008) has been used to estimate the marginal likelihoods of competing Bayesian models. In this paper it is shown that the Bernstein-von Mises (BvM) theorem holds for the power posteriors under regularity conditions. Due to the BvM theorem, the power posteriors, when adjusted by the square root of the corresponding grid points, converge to the same normal distribution as the original posterior distribution, facilitating the implementation of importance sampling for the purpose of estimating the marginal likelihood. Unlike the power-posterior method that requires repeated posterior sampling from the power posteriors, the new method …

Cournot Marked The Turn From Classical To Neoclassical Thinking, Vernon L. Smith, Sabiou M. Inoua

ESI Working Papers

For classical economists, markets served the highest value buyers without anyone in the market needing to know that it was possible to write aggregate buyer reservation prices in the form, D = F (p). Cournot, thereby launched neoclassical economics as modelling and thinking of economic action in terms of their outcome effects, rather than their roots in human experience.

The Effect Of Social Information In The Dictator Game With A Taking Option, Tanya O'Garra, Valerio Capraro, Praveen Kujal

ESI Working Papers

We experimentally study how redistribution choices are affected by positive and negative information regarding the behaviour of a previous participant in a dictator game with a taking option. We use the strategy method to identify behavioural ‘types’, and thus distinguish ‘conformists’ from ‘counter-conformists’, and unconditional choosers. Unconditional choosers make up the greatest proportion of types (about 80%) while only about 20% of subjects condition their responses to social information. We find that both conformity and counter-conformity are driven by a desire to be seen as moral (the ‘symbolization’ dimension of moral identity). The main difference is that, conformity is also …

Panel Threshold Regressions With Latent Group Structures, Ke Miao, Liangjun Su, Wendun Wang

Research Collection School Of Economics

In this paper, we consider the least squares estimation of a panel structure threshold re-gression (PSTR) model where both the slope coefficients and threshold parameters may exhibit latent group structures. We study the asymptotic properties of the estimators of the latent group structure and the slope and threshold coefficients. We show that we can estimate the latent group structure correctly with probability approaching 1 and the estimators of the slope and threshold coefficients are asymptotically equivalent to the infeasible estimators that are obtained as if the true group structures were known. We study likelihood-ratio-based inferences on the group-specific threshold parameters …

Is Real Per Capita State Personal Income Stationary? New Nonlinear, Asymmetric Panel‐Data Evidence, Furkan Emirmahmutoglu, Rangan Gupta, Stephen M. Millter, Tolga Omay

Economics Faculty Publications

This paper re‐examines the stochastic properties of U.S. state real per capita personal income, using new panel unit‐root procedures. The new developments incorporate non‐linearity, asymmetry, and cross‐sectional correlation within panel‐data estimation. Including nonlinearity and asymmetry finds that 43 states exhibit stationary real per capita personal income whereas including only nonlinearity produces 42 states that exhibit stationarity. Stated differently, we find that two states exhibit nonstationary real per capita personal income when considering nonlinearity, asymmetry, and cross‐sectional dependence.

Rhode Island Current Conditions Index -- June 2019, Leonard Lardaro

The Rhode Island Current Conditions Index

No abstract provided.

Spending Where It Matters: Exploring The Relationship Between Institutional Expenditures And Student Retention Rates At The California State University, Matias Farre

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

It is anticipated that there will be a shortage of 1.1 million college-educated workers in California by 2030 (Johnson, Bohn, & Cuellar Mejia, 2016). Within this context, the California State University (CSU) is the principal source of skilled workers in the state, producing more career-ready candidates than any other single institution (“California State University 2018 Fact Book“, n.d.).

This study examined the relationship between student retention rates and institutional expenditures across the different functional categories of instruction, student services, academic support, and instructional support at the CSU. With the exception of student grants and scholarships, these selected expenditures represent the …